But, again, you don’t read Zizek for careful attention to these matters, but the NLR is edited by very serious people. . .

In one segment, young firebrand Morton Kondracke asks Reagan a tough-seeming question about his policy in Lebanon, and Reagan tells the audience that you can’t just put your finger on a terrorist group like you can a government. Furthermore, he adds, if you indiscriminately target terrorists, you might endanger innocent civilian populations, leading to spiraling problems. Now, knowing the actual policies of the Reagan administration up to this point and subsequently, combined with the remainder of post-Reagan U.S. policy on this issue, leaves the viewer dizzy—if not briny—with irony. (Reagan mentioned Brighton as the site of the latest terrorist attack.)

There’s lots of good stuff in the LRB, needless to say. I delight in the prose style of Edward Luttwak, for instance, and his pieces on mild populist economics and Pablo Escobar are wonderful. (Escobar had beauty contestants race in the nude for the chance to win a Ferrari for instance, and, for Luttwak, such an Atalantean aesthete couldn’t have been all bad for U. S. interests.)

I have a serious interpretive problem with films of this type, where there are significant commercial considerations impeding upon what might be the narrative aspirations of the director, considerations absent from Shane Carruth’s Primer, for instance, or even one of the Buñuel films that some reviewer mentioned (perhaps it was Denby in the New Yorker; I don’t remember). Anyway, my problem is that I don’t know how seriously to take the construction of the plot. With something like Primer, which also features intricate layers of nesting, I was willing to credit the director with anything as complicated as I could think of, provided that it fit. A $7000 budget warrants obsessive attention to detail. Here, with the gratuitous, multigenre action sequences; gravity-distorting stardom; and flagrant acts of miscasting, I was left very unsure of the interpretive boundaries. I mean, it’s one thing if it’s just done for fun and is not intended to make any sense at all. I can accept that. Done well, with a refusal to take itself seriously, this mildly cynical professionalism can suggest depths that more earnest efforts never plumb.

But Inception is an earnest, humorless film. The flagrant miscasting (there might have been others, including the lead, but this is the big one) was Ellen Page as Ariadne (which, see above re interpretive charity/plausibility, etc.) I don’t know what the fuck the deal is with the Cisco commercials, first of all, but Page seems to me to be more closely typecast from Juno than Kyle MacLachlan ever was with David Lynch films. The twinge of sarcasm everpresent in her voice is almost impossible to erase from even the most translation-friendly, banal dialogue of the summer action feature; and I was cringing in anticipation of some extradiegetic popular culture reference whenever she opened her mouth. If I were extending infinite credit to Nolan, I might suspect that the name and the combination of this unusual casting choice is supposed to indicate to the audience that she is an implant from a different level than we are exposed to in the film proper, who is intended to guide the lead (what was his name, by the way? I just saw this like seven hours ago, and I’ve already forgotten it. Samuel Borr?) to a certain outcome (or inception). And thus we the audience should sense that she does not really fit with the rest of the corporate espionage trappings (which trappings are explicitly described as pseuodoevental or simulacra themselves, but this character’s hermeneutic suspicions are not easily identified with the audience’s.) I made a note to myself that I thought at the beginning that Page’s character was an “as you know, Bob” feature; and, sure, there’s some of that.

I brought a notebook with me to see this, which I rarely do at the theater. Here are some of the notes I made (since it was dark, I wrote over several of them, rendering all illegible): “return of the repressed,” “what’s the population density of Japan?”, “PKD plot,” “pharmacology and silicon,” “good plot for a video game,” “subconscious—Freud abandoned topological metaphors, should be ‘un,’; but what of basement, elevators, etc.?”, “Mombasa?”, “technology compels limitless complexity in plot generation, infinite rewatchability only way to ensure continued buzz, viewership, both tv and film (dvd) SBJ.”

I don’t want to write all of those up here, but I think you can see where I was going. I didn’t get a good look at the “postwar British artist” either, though the glimpse I caught didn’t look like Francis Bacon. I’ve never made it all the way through Metal Gear Solid IV, which came with my PS3, but the metaleptic gestures and general feel seemed very similar. I’m not joking about this. I also wrote “videogame aesthetic” in my notebook. (And am dying to read the Nicholson Baker piece in the latest or last week’s New Yorker, also.)

[Update: I fixed some typos, including a brutal misspelling of Kyle MacLachlan's name, for which I am sorry, Sex and the City and all. Also, I just now read over the Salon guide to the film, and I see that the video game angle has been worked pretty extensively, which is just more in the way of presence of presence, if you follow me.)]

“The FBI has a closed system and some of it’s encrypted. You’ll have to sign on from a guest location exactly as I tell you and download to a laptop programmed at the Justice Department [. . .] Then if VICAP hides a tracer cookie on you, it will just come back to Justice. Buy a fast laptop with a fast modem for cash over-the-counter at a volume dealer and don’t mail any warranties. Get a zip drive too. Stay off the Net with it.” (Hannibal, 234)

I’ve only been in one gathering of Pynchon specialists before, and they were nowhere near as eccentric as those Nick Holdstock describes. n+1 academic conference descriptions always, at least in this and the Elif Batuman versions I’ve read, sound closer to something out of The Futurological Congress than those I go to; but I haven’t been terribly adventurous in my choices either.

I googled Holdstock, as I sometimes will do, and found linked a degree or two from his personal blog this essay in the finding-Pynchon genre by Robert Goolrick, which I don’t remember reading before. And this struck me as odd, because I did a senior research project on Pynchon that I thought had involved reading most everything in English that had published on him at the time, including specifically biographical-type pieces. Perhaps I exaggerate my thoroughness, or I did read it and forgot about it. I admit to being curious about the rest of the letter mentioned here, and I have examined some of Pynchon’s graph-paper letters in person.

An unrelated question: Hannibal is clearly self-parody. But was The Silence of the Lambs also?

Another book I started soon after was George Akerloff and Robert Shiller’s Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, And Why It Matters for Global Capitalism. I’m particularly interested in the psychological material in this book, but I’ve only read the foreword thus far. My notes on the first page or so are only WTFs about how something called a “free market revolution” was brought about by such heroes as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Deng Xiaoping, but the writers find their way past this baroque and fanciful speculation to make a compelling analogy between demolitionists and financiers. It’s apparently—and I love learning about gritty facts such as this from economists—quite hard to find an honest demolitionist. The asbestos and such is much easier to deal with by dumping it in a river than having to go through all the pesky environmental regulations, apparently, so you can’t make money in it unless you cut corners. (Unless there are strict regulators, they point out. It was unclear to me if they think the U.S. has them, though I suppose if this was a plot point on an episode of The Sopranos it’s safe to assume otherwise.)

The book does argue for the necessity of increased financial regulation, and the authors seem largely Keynesian, which I approve of insofar as it’s a mild corrective to the market fundamentalism which dominates their profession. It’s always interesting to me to read a book written by mainstream economists after having recently immersed myself in something from the New Left Review, for example, and realize again the extent of Orwell’s problem.

AHFM resents taxes and is suspicious of the government creating new entitlements (and of Keynesian economics—he doesn’t seem to think that the events he’s discussing undermine the monetarist doctrine in any way, which would put him to the right of Greenspan). He was not an Obama supporter, which surprised me somewhat, as I would imagine that his wing of the business party would generally prove more pleasing and pliant to the hedge-fund managing classes. (The alternative, that he supported another Democrat’s presidential bid, doesn’t seem that likely from other remarks, but I could be wrong about this.) I wonder what Walter Benn Michaels would make of the footnoted remark about Harvard students having to go without a hot breakfast due to endowment losses, when a good portion of them are rich enough for their personal chefs to have personal chefs.

AHFM believes that the SEC’s focused too much on insider trading, which he seems to imply is a relatively innocuous thing (108-09). He would instead more carefully regulate information-sharing between the investment and trading branches of large banks and by predatory marketing of interest-rate-swaps and other derivatives to foreign companies and municipalities unsophisticated enough to understand them. (I remember seeing a Sixty Minutes show about some town going broke this way in the mid-90s.) I’ve always thought there was something gleefully utopian about derivatives, particularly as they become so complex that no one seems to understand their consequences. An economy where attempts at risk management scoff at the pride of their devisers and periodically destroy everything is somewhat aesthetically appealing, but for the unfortunate fact that those traders will remain almost always immune from the disasters they’ve caused. AHFM seems to hedge on this a bit, worrying at some points about what he interestingly calls the criminalization of failure and also wondering why there don’t seem to be any consequences in the financial world for colossal, epoch-shattering failures. (Prison’s clearly not an option, but some type of disgrace seems to be.)

He worries in one interesting segment, after being modestly reminded that capitalism hasn’t existed for ten thousand years, about the effects of demographics in advanced industrial societies on the universal desire for consumption, an “axiom of economics.” This reminded me somewhat of one of Chomsky’s remarks on a standard economics textbook, which suggested that the ideal ordering of society for economic actors is for everyone else to be their slave. AHFM seems committed to an equally pathological version of homo economicus, while at the same time, by the book’s end, appearing to want to retreat from it and take up the contemplative life in Austin.

I started off living in Atlanta very near the Fernbank, then moved two miles or so east. By the time this picture was taken, Clancy and I were living in a rented house not very far at all from a northeasternish curve of the perimeter. It was a woody circle, and a gnome lived next door.

The young boyfriend of the woman who becomes a skylark (and eventually goes blind) becomes himself a writer and naturally wants to find out about what happened in that meadow. (He’s already written a horror novel which used the dogheads as inspiration, and is very successful, having been on the cover of Time and living in Chicago.) He wasn’t there, himself. Spencer Mallon, the guru, more-or-less disappears from the novel, despite being by several orders of magnitude the character of the most potential interest. We have very little of the chorus hymeneal between the writer and his lark, whom he’s married and who waits until the very last to reveal her story. We hear the other stories, but the competing perspectives offer very little in the way of meaningful difference and pantextualist Hootie, who can only speak in quotations, is essentially given up on as a conceit. This is, in short, a muddled book.

Straub tends to indulge in sensationalistic violence. The plot with the Hayward serial killers, for example, is largely meaningless, unless it is to provide some type of low-grade moral speculation about the reason for evil in the world. Straub seems to be interested in the idea that psychopaths may not regard other human beings as living creatures with minds and preferences of their own and that thus pure evil is the perspective that nothing exists except for its use-value, that nothing can mean other than what it is. (This is the wisdom I described as “esoteric Straussian” above. The other woman is married to a senator now.) There’s one hallucinatory scene which seems to try to explore this idea, and the conversation that Lee Truax (the skylark) has with a demon at the end of her meadowsong attempts to prop up this jerrybuilt theodicy.

I would like to credit Straub with the capacity for moral satire. The near-opulence of the party at the end after they’ve heard Truax’s account suggests at least the possibility that this is yet another group of youthful dissidents (one of them sees dead soldiers marching with the students in the riot) who’ve grown fat and comfortable, and they are directly feasting on the proceeds of one of their party’s speculations in the libidinal economy. Meanwhile, the lean, hungry, and botox’d absent member is grooming herself for real power (she was from Arkansas, after all.) But I think this type of reading would have to very much work at the level of the political unconscious. Even as a child, when I read Ghost Story, I knew that a scene where someone would care one way or the other about the idea that Crane wrote a ghost story of his own showed that Straub’s grasp of the fullness of the world was not sure.

The exceptionally sympathetic portrayal of Wolsey as a benevolent pragmatist contrasted with the equally hostile characterization of Thomas More as an inquisitorial fanatic has caught most reviewers’ attention. Colin Burrow, for example, writes:

Thomas More is here a dogmatic persecutor of heretics (which he was), a man perhaps unhealthily obsessed by his daughter Meg (which he may have been), and someone who makes cruelly unfunny jokes about his second wife, Dame Alice (which he did). He is not much else (although he was).

Cromwell has read More’s work carefully and makes several, often ironic, references to the Utopia when thinking about him. One easy way out of Burrow’s criticism is to note that it seems plausible that Cromwell would have thought both more highly of Wolsey than subsequent observers and considerably less of More, and the entire narrative is focalized (through a somewhat unsettling use of pronouns, among other devices) through Cromwell. Much is made of the, speculative as far as I know, abusive character of his father and his subsequent dislike of callous authority and casual brutality. These are, of course, two things for which he has had quite a bad press over the years. I also wonder what will be made of his final statements before execution, which Froude and others claimed to be fraudulent slanders. Mantel surely suggests that he is in considerable sympathy with many of the key tenets of the reformation and has him remember collecting the flesh of Lollard martyr Joan Broughton. But he seems to acknowledge that this memory may have been faulty, and the ability of memory, even finely tuned mnemonic technologies, to change themselves to fit necessity is another idea explored in the novel.

Much of my recent exposure to the period has come from my wife’s interest in the Showtime series, of which I have only seen an episode or two. It’s been enough, however, to almost expect to hear in a hallway or pub some fraternity gentleman, perhaps, address another as “your grace” in a husky voice; and I have winced in advance. (Though the salaciousness of the show’s treatment of Catherine Howard, which I suppose might be covered in some way in Mantel’s sequel, will be interesting to compare.)